Francis and His Enemies

(Reprinted from the issue of March 3, 2005)

Poor
Sam Francis. His enemies were
dancing on his grave before he was even laid to rest in it.

A new
neoconservative newspaper, The Examiner, greeted
Sams death with an extraordinarily rancorous opinion piece by its
editorial page editor, David Mastio, who wrote, Sam Francis was
merely a racist and doesnt deserve to be remembered as anything
less.... America is a better place without him.

Mastios
article doesnt even show a real familiarity with Sams writing.
It was obviously cobbled together from the files of Abe Foxman, Morris Dees,
or the other victimhood vigilantes who practice character assassination
under the guise of fighting bigotry.

By the way, do we
desperately need yet another neocon paper? By my count, this country has
about 50 neoconservatives and 100 neocon publications. It wouldnt
surprise Sam that they are attacking him; he might have taken a grim
satisfaction in the fact. He was as tough a critic as they had, and they knew
it.

What does it mean to
call Sam a racist? It would be hard to find, in all his writings,
any unflattering words about racial minorities. And even if you found a few,
they would be a small fraction of his total output. Yet Mastio makes it sound
as if he were a Johnny One-Note who seldom wrote about anything else.

As a matter of fact,
Sam was a fine observer who addressed many subjects. To reduce his career
to only one of them, as Mastio does, is to have missed nearly everything.
Sam wrote less about race itself than about the race racket, the spurious
exaltation of minority groups by liberals. It was liberals, not minorities, that
were his real target, as any careful reading of his work makes clear.
Original Sin

Among those liberals
were the neoconservatives. Sam rightly saw from the start that the neocons
werent conservatives at all. They were actually liberals masquerading
as conservatives, while trying to discredit and marginalize real conservatism.
He unmasked them without mercy, so its no wonder that they
continue to attack him even in death.

After all, if
youre going to usurp a word, its all-important that you
discredit those to whom the word rightly belongs. The heretic always claims
to be the only true Christian, while insisting that true
Christians are idolaters and bigots.

Sams talent
for exposing ideological fraud made him a special threat to the neocons. He
understood that their interests werent driven by American
patriotism, but by a pro-Israel ideology which led them to urge America to
make war on the enemies of the state of Israel.

Sam didnt
often write about this explicitly, but the neocons rightly sensed that if he
penetrated the race racket, he was seeing through their racket too. But he
gave them few grounds for smearing him as an anti-Semite;
they had to settle for calling him a racist, and feigning
indignation about his racial views  which were actually more moderate
than those of their idol, Abraham Lincoln, who opposed citizenship for free
Negroes and hoped to colonize them abroad.

Sam was always a
shrewd and biting exposer of liberal hypocrisy, and his exposures became
even more trenchant when liberals refused even to admit they were liberals.
When they called themselves conservatives, or
neoconservatives, he was especially scathing.

He did, however, stop
short of defaming the dead; his sense of honor, alas, is not shared by his
enemies.

He also hated the
identification of Christianity with liberalism. He liked to point out that the
Bible never condemns slavery  a plain fact that would appall and
amaze most liberals. St. Augustine held that slavery, war, government, and
private property are all consequences of original sin. I suspect that Sam
would at least have seen his point.

Being a Southerner,
with an inherited memory of bitter defeat, made Sam immune to facile
optimism and suspicious of those who espoused it. But the rejection of
optimism is enough to make you vulnerable to the charge that you
hate the objects of liberalisms bogus benevolence. In
Sams case, his dark view of human nature, applicable to race as to
everything else, allowed his enemies to portray him as racist
and to ignore nearly all he had to say on other matters.

But it was the
totality of Sams views that won him his devoted readership. When
you read him, you knew you were getting an honest vision of political reality.
It might be painful; it might err on the side of cynicism; but at least it was no
bluff. Sam refused to pretend that all was well when you, and he, knew
better. He saw the world without illusions, as we all need to do.
A Brave Corrective

If there was anything
missing from Sams vision, it was Christian hope. At times his picture
of the world was too grim. He could see that the world was largely going to
Hell; Im not sure he saw that part of it, at the same time, was going
to Heaven. This is perhaps why his skepticism sometimes spilled over into
downright cynicism.

Nevertheless, Sam
was a brave corrective to an age that pressures all of us into a false
unanimity. He wasnt afraid to stand alone, to be the only man willing
to express an unfashionable view  and not because it was
unfashionable, but simply because he thought it was true.

And the neocons
knew that if even one man opposed them, he had to be dealt with. They
managed to get him fired from The Washington Times; they kept him out of
their own forums; they refused to answer his arguments; they tried to act
as if he didnt exist.

And yet, when Sam
died, we found that his enemies were well aware of his existence, and felt
that he still had to be dealt with, if only by posthumous defamation. Hence
Mastios attempt to reduce him to a single topic, one lost cause.

But Sam Francis was
never smug enough to assume that a lost cause was a bad cause. He fought
for any cause he thought worthy, regardless of whether it had any chance of
prevailing. He was resigned to losing; he was even resigned to being
misrepresented and smeared.

So brave a man
surely deserved better enemies.



SOBRANS
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